The Garage

Our neighborhood was composed of older houses. Ours had been built around 1900 or so, and several of the surrounding houses were of that age or maybe even a little older. There of course were no houses older than the Wisconsin, which became a state in 1848 (if I remember correctly), but compared to some of the houses, ours was considered old.

Although later Mom and Dad put in an overhead door which operated by a rope, early on our garage had enormous wooden doors on two sides. The doors slid open sideways on metal wheels that ran on tracks above the doors. I asked Dad why there were doors on both sides, and he said it was because the garage had been a stable for horses and for storing carriages. I did not really know how that would necessitate doors on both sides, but ok.

As soon as he told me that, I wanted to get a horse. We had only one car, and therefore, room for a horse! Dad was clearly horrified at the prospect, but I swore I would take care of it. I did not really take care of Gypsy, so I guess I was deceiving myself. At any rate, we never did get a horse.

Our driveway was shared with the next-door neighbors. When I was very young the driveway was composed of gravel. When it rained, there were nice puddles in the ruts. I would make islands of gravel and popsicle-stick houses on the islands. In the summer, those puddles were warm and grey.

Between the two garages was a narrow alleyway, about the width of a grownup. There was a metal pipe that stuck up from the ground at one end. If a child were not careful, he or she could be running full tilt through that alleyway and trip on that pipe, to crash on the ground. It happened to me many times. There was gravel between the garages and the space between the roofs dripped so that there was a little V shape in the gravel. It was always cool, dim and moist in that area.

Inside the garage were all sorts of rusting objects. There were glass jars of rusting nails, usually bent, which we could straighten with hammers and use for various projects. There were old flowerpots with spiderwebs on them, a tool bench that was never used in my memory, and the iron lawn furniture. Later Mom and Dad had the backyard landscaped, and they got rid of that old furniture and replaced it with some that had nylon mesh seating, which then rested in the garage during the winters also.